Norman Withers - Mystical Old Man Hunch Deck

NOTE: This deck was built for The Blob That Ate Everything at Pax Unplugged 2019. It was intended to play alongside Mark Harrigan and "Ashcan" Pete, so it is very clue focused. That said, check the upgrade section for ways to build better for solo.

Strategy

Norman's ability is weird - he can have one card revealed, and can play it once per round at -1 resource. With his statline, he is able to investigate and find clues with little to no assistance using his natural 5 , so he doesn't really require much setup. The point of this deck is the following:

Mulligan hard to get Hawk-Eye Folding Camera and St. Hubert's Key. The key puts you at a passive 5 and 6 , boosted to a possible 7 and 8 when your cameras are fully loaded. The cameras can additionally keep St. Hubert's key alive a little longer. With these high stats, we won't use any other gimmicks to investigate, use spells, or deal with the mythos. We can just plainly take and tests without having to care much about boosts and commits.

Use your two Arcane Initiate(s) to reshuffle your deck if you don't like what's on top, and use Scrying to re-order your deck to avoid weaknesses and change what's on top. Also use Eureka! and No Stone Unturned for their ability to shuffle your deck. Note that with the upgraded initiates and scrying, none of these shuffle abilities take actions - this is important for situations like being engaged with an enemy where you might want access to a specific card like Mind over Matter or Deny Existence - you have a number of ways to change what's on top of your deck and hopefully get what you want.

A significant chunk of the events in this deck are cost 0-2 and fast - meaning if they are on the top of your deck, you might as well just play them because they're entirely free. Treat the top of your deck like Joe's hunch deck.

Use occult lexicon and crack the case to keep yourself in resources as needed.

Potential Changes and Upgrades

Initially this deck was built and tested with 3x Open Gate instead of the 2x Mists of R'lyeh and Deny Existence, but Open Gate isn't great in every scenario, and Norman occasionally needs a way to deal with enemies. For another 10XP in standalone, you can drop the 2x Mists of R'lyeh and Deny Existence for 2x Shrivelling (3) and Mists of R'lyeh (4) gives Norman a lot to do with that high .

In solo, I would drop charisma and downgrade ward of protection to free up 7XP and use that for Shrivelling.